Wednesday, June 10, 2009

One: Of Turds, Termites, and Terminal Degrees of Freedom – or 'Fabricating Turds' for short


True religion and undefiled, is to give everyone land freely to manure co-operatively.
– Gerard Winstanley

I recently had the pleasure of attending a conference (“Reflections on Fifty Years of the American Experience”) celebrating the work and teaching of Michael Zuckerman. It was a fabulous affair and very much a tribute to a historian who has influenced a great many people, among whom I number myself.

What follows: first, for what it’s worth, a brief (no doubt lengthy) description of the ways in which Mike has influenced me and a few words on our interactions over the past 27-odd years since I walked into History 700 at Penn. And, then, a few more words about one of the questions raised during the presentations in Mike’s honor.

It was a surprise to me when I thought back over the years and came to the conclusion that Mike had been so influential in my own intellectual development. I cannot attribute all my cantankerousness and desire for disputation, and quirkiness (inasmuch as these exist) to Mike, as I am sure I learned a great deal from others – most notably Owen Dudley Edwards at Edinburgh University – but to have taken the introductory graduate course in history at Penn with Mike was a very significant experience indeed.

Fabricating Turds
What was this course? This was the so-called “Proseminar in History,” designed to provide an introduction to the discipline for in-coming graduate students. Frequently, these seminars started from Thucydides and worked up through Macaulay to Braudel and Foucault. For our seminar, Mike had decided we would take on the literature of Modernization, since this was interesting him at this time. One of the curious aspects of this was that modernization was beginning to fall out of favor, and the easiest thing for us graduate students to do as we were taking our first steps in grad school was begin an all-out assault on the notion. But, not so fast; insofar as we wanted to jettison the concept, Mike felt we might want to hang onto it; but, by the same token, to the extent that we agreed with some of its assumptions, Mike felt they were questionable (the key was not “to throw the baby out with the bath water”). This is somewhat of an overstatement, but it was very much the case that each class was entirely unpredictable in terms of how Mike would react to the readings. This made each meeting, even with the reticence of new graduate students, more engaging than it might otherwise have been.

A list of the readings Mike offered provides a good sense of what we covered that semester:

Week 1:
Introduction
Week 2:
Ruth Benedict, “Continuities and Discontinuities in Cultural Conditioning,” Psychiatry 1 (1938), 161-7
Pierre Bourdieu, “The Attitude of the Algerian Peasant toward Time,” in J.A. Pitt-Rivers, ed., Mediterranean Countrymen, pp. 55-72
George Foster, “Peasant Society and the Image of Limited Good,” American Anthropologist 67 (1965), 293-315
Clifford Geertz, “Person, Time, and Conduct in Bali,” in The Interpretation of Cultures, pp. 360-411
Clifford Geertz, “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight,” in The Interpretation of Cultures, pp. 412-53
A. Irving Hallowell, “Ojibwa Ontology, Behavior, and World-View,” in Stanley Diamond, ed., Primitive Views of the World, pp. 49-82
June Nash, “The Logic of Behavior: Curing in a Maya Indian Town,” Human Organization 26 (1967), 132-9
Robert Redfield, “The Social Organization of Tradition,” in Peasant Society and Culture, pp. 40-59
Victor Turner, “A Ndembu Doctor in Practice,” in The Forest of Symbols, pp. 359-93
Eric Wolf, “Closed Corporate Peasant Communities in MesoAmerica and Central Java,” Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 13 (1957), 1-18

Week 3:
Talcott Parsons, et al., eds., Theories of Society, pp. 191-201 (Toennies), pp. 208-13 and 436-43 (Durkeim), pp. 315-8 (Cooley), and pp. 331-47 (Schmalenbach)
Robert Merton, “Patterns of Influence: Local and Cosmopolitan Influentials,” in Social Theory and Social Structure
C. E. Black, The Dynamics of Modernizationi, pp. 1-34
Samuel Huntington, “The Change to Change: Modernization, Development, and Politics,” Comparative Politics 3 (1971), 283-98
W. W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth, pp. 1-35


Week 4:
Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie, Montaillou
Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie, “Motionless History,” Social Science History 1 (1977), 115-36

Week 5:
Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, pp. 13-102, 138-67, 231-67, 276-95, 312-461, 657-756, 892-903, 1238-44

Week 6:
Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, ch. 1, 21, 22

Week 7:
E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Past and Present 38 (1967), 56-97
E. P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century, “ Past and Present (50 (1971), 76-136
Edmund Morgan, “The Labor Problem at Jamestown, 1607-1618,” American Historical Review 76 (1971), 596-611
Herbert Gutman, “Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America,” American Historical Review 78 (1973), 531-88
Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down, ch. 1-2, 16-18
Marcus Rediker, “‘Under the Banner of King Death’: The Social World of Anglo-American Pirates, 1716-1726,” William and Mary Quarterly 38 (1981), 203-27

Week 8:
Philippe Aries, Centuries of Childhood

Week 9:
David Landes, The Unbound Prometheusu, pp. 1-358

Week 10:
Karl Marx, “Preface” to Critique of Political Economy
Karl Marx, Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations
Karl Marx, Manifesto of the Communist Party
Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon
Karl Marx, “The British Rule in India”
Andre Gundar Frank, Latin America: Underdevelopment or Revolution? ch. 1

Week 11:
Reinhard Bendix, “Tradition and Modernity Reconsidered,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 9 (1967), 292-346
Daniel Calhoun, “Participation versus Coping,”
Raymond Grew, “Modernization and its Discontents,” American Behavioral Scientist 12 (1977), 289-312
Alan Macfarlane, The Origins of English Individualism
Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph, The Modernity of Tradition, pp. 3-14
Dean Tipps, “Modernization Theory and the Comparative Study of Societies: A Critical Perspective,” Comparative Studies in Society and History15 (1973)
E. A. Wrigley, “The Process of Modernization and the Industrial Revolution in England,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 3 (1972), 225-59
Michael Zuckerman, “Dreams that Men Dare to Dream: The Role of Ideas in Western Modernization,” Social Science History 2 (1978), 332-45

Week 12:
David McClelland, The Achieving Society, ch. 1-4, 10
Alex Inkeles and David Smith, Becoming Modern, ch. 1-3, 6-8, 9-12, 18-21
Stanley Bailis, “Individuals Coping: Modernization and Habitual Change,” in Harold Sharlin, ed., The Freedoms of Enterprise

Week 13:
Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” in The Frontier in American History
Louis Hartz, The Founding of New Societies, ch. 1
Bernard Bailyn, Education in the Forming of American Society, pp. 3-49
James Henretta, The Evolution of American Society, 1700-1815
James Henretta, “Families and Farms: Mentalité in Pre-Industrial America,” William and Mary Quarterly 35 (1978), 3-32
Michael Zuckerman, “The Fabrication of Identity in Early America,” William and Mary Quarterly 34 (1977), 183-214


As far as these readings were concerned, there was not much on race, not much on gender, and no Orientalism. But the point was, I think, not that we became familiar with all the different trends and issues emerging in the discipline, but that we become equipped to respond to them when we were confronted with them (whatever they might be in the future); and perhaps we might even be equipped to introduce a few ourselves. I am sure many other students would have disagreed with this approach, and would have (and probably did) complain about the absence of material on women and African Americans (in particular), but I never felt this absence. My interest before coming to Penn had been in intellectual history and in W.E.B. Du Bois, and so reading the kinds of things that we were looking at fit with my sense of what I needed to do at this juncture.

And it was also significant that a majority of the authors were not even historians. From psychologists to economists, political scientists, sociologists, and anthropologists, we read across the range of the disciplines, and frequently the actual historians found themselves crowded out of the week’s readings. This was quite suggestive about the nature of the profession. We were not being provided with a basic grounding in different historiographies; this was rather an interdisciplinary approach to grappling with a single concept. Understanding any historical concept, Mike seemed to be suggesting, would require that we read as widely as we were doing with regard to theories of Modernization. In many ways, this was very different from other introductory courses that would tend to focus on different examples of historical writing from different fields. It certainly provided a solid grounding intellectually; but it wasn’t an approach to graduate education based in emulation of the leading lights of the discipline. I liked Mike’s particular method, but many students may have preferred another.

Each week we wrote two pages of comments on the texts we read or something about them that we found interesting, and Mike would respond with almost as many comments about what we had written all scribbled in pencil in somewhat indecipherable capitals incorporating symbols for groups of letters (e.g., a single squiggle for the letters ‘the’ whenever these letters appeared, per4mance, 2 for to, etc., a whole abbreviated language pre-texting). This took a couple of weeks to get used to. The comments were largely in the margins, but would be followed with an overall reaction. These had a flavor that generally encouraged and challenged in a single flourish (e.g., This is fantastic, but…; Despite my carping at how badly you have misread these texts, this is a neat argument).

Here are some of his reactions to my comments:
On Bourdieu: I think you’re wrong, radically wrong, about Bourdieu’s ethnocentrism, and I think you substitute repetitious charge for substantiation of it, but this is a splendidly thoughtful and penetrating essay, full of delicious things. You control and focus a complex argument, and you develop it in real seriousness.

On Toennies and Durkeim: This is a brilliantly organized and beautifully conceived essay. Everything connects, and is sustained, and is important. Unfortunately, I think it is quite wrong about Durkheim and misses (a crucial part of) the point about Toennies, mistaking his ideal types for actual historical analysis. But all that is relatively trivial. The level of intelligence and critical power and verve at work (play) here is sensational.

On Braudel: I don’t think you quite bring it off, but this is a wonderfully wide-ranging yet deep-cutting paper. You don’t understand Turner (or at any rate you don’t understand him as I do), but you get gorgeous mileage out of invoking him as a means of raising pivotal questions and throughout you confront the big issues and confront them bravely and suggestively even if not as compellingly as I could wish.


On Weber: Even more in the exposition than in the critique, this is a marvelously assured and intelligent performance. For all my carping, I am impressed.

On Gutman: An intelligent argument on an intelligently established and assuredly important question. I didn’t always find it compelling – I think sometimes you go as far in the opposite direction as your antagonists go in their direction, and so you miss some things – but I found it steadily informed, engaged, and ambitious. I could hardly ask for more.

On Aries: This is a fine paper, not least for its mating of impatience with Aries’ failure to offer causal accounts and its sure and, if not sympathetic, at least comprehending grasp of what is and isn’t doing. I offered my own view of causality at the end of class; you’ll get it again in my “Dreams” essay in a few weeks. But I would add that, even if nothing could be advance on Aries’ behalf, with regard to explanation, I would still say you make too much of a fetish of explanation. Historians do very badly along that line – in a perverse mood I’d challenge you to show me a single satisfactory historical explanation of a significant phenomenon – and I think it would be a mistake and an unfortunate one at that, to make explanation the principal measure of historical adequacy. There are so many other things historians do.

On Landes: I think you began from a (largely, not entirely) misplaced irritation with the use of a single word – rationality – and just dug deeper and deeper thereafter. It’s a decent polemic for some other target, but it doesn’t quite connect with this one. Also, though I am cosmically sympathetic to your epistemological points, I am rather less concretely sympathetic. As I tried to suggest in the margins there is room in such an epistemology for issues of degree, and a difference in degree is all that Landes really requires. He knows – and says – that Europeans weren’t wholly rational (on his delimited definition of rational) any more than they were utterly into private enterprise, Faustianism, etc. He’s trying only to identify the differences in “scope and effectiveness” (to use your own quotation from him) in such elements that could account for the distinctively different (in degree) outcomes in different cultures.

On Grew: This is, despite my comments in the margins, a thoughtful and intelligent paper. I can’t for the life of me, though, fathom why you’d want to waste your thought and intelligence on a straw man, or where you even got the travesty of modernization theory you assail. Almost nothing – sometimes literally nothing in our readings sustains the characterization you impute to it; and as Grew suggests re the likes of Tipps, one only demeans oneself debunking straw men, especially when there are targets of stature you’re shying off. As in that last paragraph, this paper simply never gets the real targets in its sights. Modernization theories may not be the right or best theories of cultural interaction and conflict, but they are exactly theories of cultural interaction and conflict. If you don’t see that you are not even in the game. [reflection: since “the game” was very much moving on from modernization at this time, I am not sure I was too much out of line with what many others would have said; perhaps modernization was killed once it was turned into a straw man, and Mike was opposing this as much as he was reacting to me.]
On McClelland: How do I say this without seeming to contradict myself? I think you mistake McClelland and mistake Toynbee – rather badly in both cases – and yet I think this is an impressive piece of analysis. I’ve tried to indicate some of the misconstructions in the margins. What I’ve not been able to say there is how splendidly the focus and the thread of argument are, how close the reading and reasoning are, how sensible and judicious the comparisons are in their insistence – at high levels of abstraction – on common ground between two men, how ingenious the argument often is. If the writings the two were as you say they are to begin with this would be an utterly brilliant essay. [reflection: being “brilliantly wrong”, we learned at the conference was, in Mike’s eyes, better than being “boringly right,” so perhaps I passed a test on this one!]

On Hartz: I don’t entirely agree with your premises, analysis, or conclusion, but this is an ambitious essay and a thoughtful one besides. It scatters intriguing questions and insights, and my differences with it are more often matters of our divergent judgments than of your deficient readings and reflections.

II. Termites
My favorite comment is definitely the one from Aries’s Centuries of Childhood, which is suggestive about the impact of this course. If one remembers that the course was (in part) intended to introduce graduates to the profession into which they were moving, such comments about me making a fetish of explanation are certainly different from what one might expect. Many historians would like to claim that one of the things they did was explain why things happened, but Mike was essentially saying that this was a lost cause: “in a perverse mood I’d challenge you to show me a single satisfactory historical explanation of a significant phenomenon – and I think it would be a mistake and an unfortunate one at that, to make explanation the principal measure of historical adequacy” – and this was before post-modern and post-colonial theorists who might have agreed. I, too, would tend now to agree with this comment, but I am not sure many historians take the idea that explanation is beyond them into the college classroom and try to sell it to their students. Of course, they should probably do so; they would then less frequently be tools of “standards” and/or political ideologies, but the students would no doubt balk at their professor continually shying away from explanation for particular historical occurrences. Such comments were like anarchic termites eating away at the pillars of the profession, suggesting that the halls of wisdom constructed since the professionalizing of the discipline in the last quarter of the 19th century, needed to be brought tumbling to the ground, since they were potentially built upon mistaken assumptions.
The class itself started with a fairly strained discussion of ideas, but probably less strained than other courses of this nature might have been considering the students’ lack of familiarity with the material they were contemplating. Mike would then end with half-an-hour of comments to wrap things up. Curiously, while he encouraged interventions from everyone, the end of the class was his time to “go off” and develop the ideas that were gelling in his mind as the discussion had been continuing. It was almost impossible to interject at this stage, and if something he said raised a question in your mind, you had to wait till after the class to finish it. This is not a criticism, really, as these were often the most provoking and stimulating parts of the class; it was almost as if he was in a trancelike state communing with his ideas aloud, and he really didn’t notice the hands as they went up in the air – which they did at the beginning of the semester, until this ritual was imbibed.

What I liked about this Proseminar was that it confirmed everything for me about what graduate school was meant to be. We were supposed to be training, in my opinion, to take on all who came before. I had learned enough about historiography at Edinburgh, to know that history was about interpretations, and competing ones at that, so it made sense that we were going to need to make our own and need to be able to take on all-comers. Every author was up for grabs – they all needed to be understood, but they also needed to be interrogated and critiqued.

While we certainly read some great historians, there was no sense that we were doing this reverentially; there was absolutely nothing pre-professional about this class, and this made our cohort very distinctive from some of those that preceded it and all of those that followed. Again, it may not be appropriate to attribute all of this to Mike, since what he was doing certainly fit with my predisposition (and maybe that of others), but I certainly differed from many of the other Penn graduate students in terms of thinking about the job market. It never occurred to me to think about working on projects that would be helpful to secure a job down the road. What ended up later as my book – Sparks from the Anvil of Oppression – had its first iteration in the second semester of this course, the research paper – and it was a distinctly messy thing – trying to cover African American migration in light of interpretations of modernization (Schmalenbach being the person whose theories I found most useful). The paper had some good points, but it had many bad ones also – it was written by someone who had brought over his passive voice from England, it was trying to cover too much, and it really wasn’t able to get at the people whose identities were supposedly being shaped/fabricated in the process of migration (so in fact it could not really tell you what they thought about community and individualism, or much else). You could perhaps attach any particular theory you wanted to the migrants in this paper, and the facts would help you in doing so equally well – whichever one you selected.

There was definitely a book somewhere in there, but I was advised, by almost everyone except Mike, not to go anywhere near it with a barge pole, and instead to think of some other topic that I could work on, and preferably not in African American history – as that would never enable me to get a job. Mike, himself, probably never gave what I worked on another thought; as far as he was concerned what I had been doing in this paper was an exercise for his class, some way of trying out some of the ideas he had floated in the previous semester. It wasn’t to be thought of as the beginning of work towards our dissertation, though it turned out to be the case for at least two of the people in the class whose books began in that second semester.

Of course, I ignored those who said I shouldn’t work on this anymore, but not so much deliberately. While I was wandering the intellectual halls both within and beyond the discipline, I really was not approaching a topic of any kind, and when I finished my oral exams, I was still undecided about what I would work on for my dissertation. I had written a long paper on South Africa and the United States, and so the best bet might have been that I would do something comparative. But South Africa was an Apartheid regime so I had no desire to travel there to undertake research, and while the African Methodist churches I had studied presented me with the idea of writing a chapter or article on their involvement in Southern Africa (something I dropped when I learned that James Campbell was working on this topic at Berkeley), nothing really had emerged as a viable topic. Two or three things decided my course, and sent me back to working on African American migrants. First a lot of interlibrary loan requests were filled in the year or two following the completion of my paper for Mike – and these were really very interesting and made it seem as if there was something very much worth doing. Some of this material had great potential for using quantitative methods (which I had learned after my first year) and that approach seemed like it might offer some interesting avenues for new inquiry. But, also, two titles came to me, one for the dissertation itself (“Sparks”), and the other for an article. There had been a nifty section of the paper about the pastor at Mother Bethel confronting his congregation and the split that ensued, that I began to realize really might work on its own. I tried it out on Mike (though I am not sure why I showed it to him first, as I hadn’t had much communication with him in the intervening three years since the course) with the title of “The Earnest Pastor’s Heated Term,” beginning with a chase down the streets of South Philadelphia, and he loved it. He said it could stand by itself and didn’t need all the rest of the baggage that I had attached to it in my original paper, and so I submitted it to The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, and it was accepted (and, I was led to believe, became one of their more successful articles – attracting a wide readership).
Titles became incredibly important to me, and this may be something I got from Mike, as I don’t recall ever having had a penchant for them before – and most titles seem rather deadening in the historical profession. In fact, when a Temple University Press editor suggested that I change my title (as it was too long and she didn’t think it would be good for marketing as the readership wouldn’t really know what it meant), I said I wouldn’t (even though she was probably right). As far as I was concerned the book wouldn’t have existed if I hadn’t had the title on which to hang it. Once I had come upon the title, found in a sentence from the writings of another African American pastor, I had my book – it almost wrote itself. I couldn’t imagine changing that, and since, generally speaking, the titles come to me before the work on which they are based, I remain pretty loyal to them.
But, I may be digressing, or at least, I may have come to the end of what I need to say about the beginnings of my intellectual debt to Mike, so I have started to ramble on, off point. A couple of things need to be said, however, before moving to a discussion of one of the points raised at Mike’s conference. What there is that is left to say is that after his effusive response to “The Earnest Pastor”, I continued to go back to him to receive feedback. I didn’t show him my dissertation, nor the book manuscript as it developed, but as I began to realize that all those folks who said I would never get a tenure-track job writing on African Methodists in Philadelphia began to seem prescient, I started to send Mike all the other things that I was working on – various think pieces. There was one on Imperialism in America (“The Imperial Nexus”), which I had shown to Daniel Rodgers at Princeton and which he really didn’t like (I think mainly because he felt that I was dredging up the usual Progressive suspects, though the point I was making was that American Progressivism could be reconfigured – he had dismantled it – if one thought of it in terms of a larger imperial framework – and to some extent he did something similar himself in relocating it in comparative terrain), and which Walter Licht at Penn liked somewhat (describing it as “wild and woolly”, which I appreciated). But Mike was effusive. He called me up about it and just was incredibly positive. He didn’t say anything like, drop everything and turn this into a book; he just indicated that what I was doing was insightful and interesting, and that was enough for him (and, to hear it from him, for me). As a result of my sending him this paper, he began to invite me to join his salons, something I only managed to do on a couple of occasions as I was by now living and teaching at Princeton.

This was also about the same time that Mike came to Princeton to present “The Power of Blackness,” an article that I have to say had the most profound influence on me. I have written about this piece elsewhere, both in my second book, in a small essay on Saint Domingue, and in my blog (“The Now Nation”). I didn’t go to the presentation. I am not sure why, except that while I was at Princeton I seem to have stuck pretty closely to just catering to my students and didn’t really stick my head above water. But the reverberations from Mike’s visit could be heard up and down the corridors of Dickinson Hall for several weeks afterwards. The confrontation with Sean Wilentz (which may not actually have been a direct one in the seminar) had caused quite a stir. Sean loved Jefferson; Mike had portrayed him as the first true racist. Ouch! I was with Mike on this one, having sat through Sean’s lectures and thinking somewhat the same thing about Jefferson, and I just loved the paper.

Other papers of mine have received the Zuckerman treatment. He loved “Apropos Exceptionalism”, though I didn’t share this with him before I submitted it for the conference at University College, London, when we were both to present there. After my presentation had gone horrendously and I left before the last presentation during which the commentator discussed my essay and pronounced it among the best of those written for the conference, Mike very nicely let me know that I had really missed something – of course, I didn’t tell him that I had just left as a result of being unable to speak to anybody after my presentation, but perhaps he sensed that.

“Unreal Cities: London, Bombay, New York” he found exciting, and suggested that I incorporate the students’ reactions to the course more prominently into the paper. That seemed quintessentially Mike – the need not to just have the professor’s view of the course in the paper, but to include the words of the people he was inflicting these ideas on. This improved the paper greatly. He encouraged me to submit the article for publication, which I did, and the result was a Teaching Radical History essay in Radical History Review.

And, on and on. I don’t think I showed him my critiques of E.P. Thompson, and I am not sure why I didn’t share them with him; but I believe I gave him a copy of my second book (Inside Out, Outside In), as I thought he might like it. I don’t believe, though, that I actually gave him the credit he deserved in the acknowledgments, which is curious. I dedicated the book to Owen Dudley Edwards, in part because I felt that the quixotic aspect of the book had derived from his classes at Edinburgh; but in much of what I was writing about, the manner in which I was writing it, and the support that Mike had a times given me meant that it actually owed as much, if not more to Zuckerman than to Dudley Edwards. Be that as it may, mention of this book provides a segue into a discussion of a couple of the points raised at the conference, partly because this was a book of essays (which Mike indicated was his preferred currency), and partly because it in many ways fit within the realm of what (we learned at the conference) was referred to as “doing a Zuckerman” – assaulting the establishment.

III. Terminal Degrees of Freedom
The first panel had touched largely on two essays: “Fabrication of Identity in Early America” (1977), and “Tocqueville, Turner, and Turds: Four Stories of Manners in Early America” (1998). The summary of “Fabrication” was thorough, and took me back to the History 700 in which we had read it. It occurred to me that a lot of the things that I had been writing about migration – especially that to be found in Histrionyx (my on line book) were founded in ideas that came from the Proseminar and which were embedded in “Fabrication.” The presentation of Mike’s argument seemed to contradict that to be found in his “Turds” article, but I wasn’t sure if this was just the way they had been presented, or whether Mike’s own view had developed over the 21 years between the two articles. If there was a contradiction, did that matter? I am not sure, and I am not sure Mike would necessarily have felt troubled by it. To be extremely brief both essays had challenged fundamental assumptions historians had about Americans in the 18th century. The “Turds” article seemed from the description to have been the equivalent of defecating in the middle of a seminar where all the major colonial Americanists were pontificating away. This, after all, was being published in the hallowed Journal of American History!

What became clear in the discussion of the “Turds” piece was that Mike had undertaken an assault on the 18th-century history-wallahs and had angered, not to say traumatized, many of his targets in the establishment. The question arose, not surprisingly perhaps, whether or not a scholar would have been able to write such a piece today, especially if the person wasn’t a full professor at an Ivy League institution. This question intrigued me, as did Mike’s response to it. It was somewhat contradictory. On the one hand he believed that we should all be doing these things, questioning and being contrary, and that as often as not those who do so end up being celebrated for their work. At another level, he had a fatalistic feeling that there was a kind of zeitgeist, not static and unchanging, such that one could have little or no control over whether one’s work was acknowledged and supported.

Those who take risks may be rewarded, and here Mike mentioned pre-tenured, probationary faculty who get involved in community work, rather than simply tying themselves to working on their manuscripts. Such folk seem to fare better in the tenure process than those who pinned all their hopes on the success of their monographs. This, however, speaks less to the radical nature of the manuscripts that they were slaving away at and the degree to which these authors were endeavoring to turn the world upside down. And the likelihood that someone would be making waves (unsupported at some level by a mentor) is diminished by the fact that the tenure-track candidate had needed such support in the form of letters of recommendation in order to get the job in the first place – and from that point they are merely endeavoring to fulfill expectations. Serious assaults on the establishment seldom occur prior to tenure, and as one person at the conference noted, if they don’t occur prior to tenure, they are unlikely to happen when the faculty member has become more firmly established.

So the power of the zeitgeist is bolstered by-and-large by the faculty member’s sense that he or she needs to tread carefully. It is true that if the person can get published and can make waves, it may work to his advantage – the fact that David Washbrook, Rosalind O’Hanlan, and Burton Stein responded so viscerally to Gyan Prakash’s work, for example, can’t have been pleasant for him, but it didn’t necessarily hurt his career (though it should be noted that Gyan’s more radical pieces followed, rather than preceded, the publication of Bonded Histories, which by contrast was less threatening to the establishment – and it should also be mentioned that being ensconced at Princeton was better than sniping from the periphery of a lower-tier institution). My sense is that wherever Mike had been he would have undertaken his work, and his abilities would have produced similar effects, but many others would not have been so successful, and, these days, with publication limitations and job markets changing, he might have had to resort to doing so in non-traditional ways – e.g., writing on the web instead of in the Journal of American History.

The two impulses, the individual’s need to seek out whatever was most compelling to him or her, come what may, and the overall impulse against doing this if the Profession (capital P) found it to be less than worthy, could sit cheek by jowl (a phrase commonly used by Mike, I recall) without much problem. But here I think the issue of power is elided, along with the privilege of the Ivy League (or an element of it). The zeitgeist signifies power, at one level, and unless you have power of your own to draw on you can be squashed like a bug. The author of “Fabrication of Identity” and “Turds” had significant resources at his disposal allowing him to say what he wanted, so that it would end up being heard, and so that it would be taken seriously. Others who submitted articles along the same lines would probably not be so fortunate. This is not to discount the fact that the two articles were written by a craftsman, whose skills could not be altogether ignored; and they are written by someone operating at the height of his skills, a dizzying height indeed. But would he have been able to publish such pieces on the way up to the top?

Two answers can be suggested to this. One can be drawn from the account given about the publishing of “Turds”; another can be drawn from the fate of a paper written by another author in another time and place. We heard at the conference from one of the readers for the JAS that Zuckerman’s fingerprints were all over the article; clearly one doesn’t want to go too far down the road of suggesting that this was a key to its publication, but since this reader was a former student of Mike’s it seems fair to suggest that this had an impact on the reading of the article and his recommendation. Similarly, the JAH editor thought the article was really “a joke,” Mike mentioned. Would this editor have been as sanguine about publishing this piece, one that clearly would upset some major historians, had he known it had come from the pen of the ultra-serious Jane Stubbings of Podonk State in Montana? My guess is probably not!

The second piece of evidence we have is the story of the paper of mine entitled “Class, Culture, and Empire,” [CCE] (a play on Herbert Gutman, which, in turn, was a play on Raymond Williams). Produced for a conference in Oxford, it was an account of the reaction from an established labor historian to the essay Madhavi Kale and I published on E. P. Thompson and empire (“The Empire and Mr. Thompson”) – published in the Economic and Political Weekly in India (since we believed it a little too incendiary, long, and unorthodox a piece to fit in any of the professions journals in the U.S. – and given the story of “Turds” at the JAH, this wasn’t too unrealistic an assessment). CCE was the talk of the conference, particularly on the floor among participants (who were especially interested in the “My Dinner with Andre” section), and it certainly raised the ire of the two major historians attending the conference, one the keynote speaker, and the other the commentator, both of whom considered themselves Thompsonians. At the beginning of the conference there was no question that my essay would be in the book (the organizer had eulogized it effusively by email prior to my arrival); immediately after the conference I was informed that the piece was being dropped from the book, because both the Thompsonian twins would not include their pieces in the book if mine was in there (my piece was almost worth the same as their two pieces, but not quite, apparently!). Of course, the paper saw the light of day later in the Journal of Historical Sociology, but not until after one of the readers wrote to the editors saying, “this is a gossipy piece…[that] quickly loses its charm…some of it I found offensive, most is disagreeable.” Fortunately the editor didn’t take these remarks seriously, “because they were not backed by any substantive discussion of the arguments in [the] paper,” and rushed the article into print.

There are many ways that the zeitgeist so-called can get established. It is through such readers’ reviews of articles as the one just mentioned; through tenure reviews; through senior scholars’ and their acolytes’ commentaries on panels; through the senior scholar’s withholding of a review of a book she doesn’t like (and then not returning the book to the journal so it can be reviewed by someone else); through the appointment of particular worthies to Association committees studying new approaches to history; and so forth. These actions are on-going and occur at the level of material reality, rather than in the realm of ideas. They do a great deal to shape discourses and actual people end up being the profession’s gatekeepers. This doesn’t mean that change doesn’t occur, but generally it does so in a managed way at the center among the powerbrokers themselves, who decide to jump on a bandwagon, and who, by and large get the credit for the transformation (internationalizing American history, anyone?).

The Ph.D. then opens the doors to many possibilities for the individual but as a terminal degree it is frequently something that comes with the shutting down of freedom to develop and express certain ideas. Thorstein Veblen largely had it correct when he suggested that as people acquire the skills for certain professions they also develop certain “trained incapacities.” Much of the training that goes on in graduate schools seems to fit this. But this was not the case in Mike Zuckerman’s class. One may not have developed all the professional skills, and one may not have become primed to succeed in the profession, but one was definitely taught to engage any idea, backed by a zeitgeist or not, and hold one’s own. For that I will certainly always be extremely grateful to him for his willingness to buck the system and aspire to be unique.